The wedding crasher

Looks as if somebody showed up at the wrong reception

It was, by all accounts, a lovely wedding.
Some 300 guests gathered at the Cathedral of the Immaculate
Conception to observe the nuptials of the happy couple — the
beautiful bride a health-care provider, the handsome groom an
up-and-coming public sector attorney. The bridesmaids wore black
gowns with platinum accents and carried red roses — the
perfect color scheme for a wedding on New Year’s Eve. After
the ceremony, the celebration moved to a downtown hotel, where a
band entertained guests in the big ballroom. As the groom entered the reception, he passed
the gift table, set up in the hallway just outside the ballroom,
and, before he could squelch it, the thought “Is that a
secure location?” flickered across his mind. It was
immediately followed by embarrassment, even guilt. “Oh God!
What are you even thinking like that for?” he chided himself. It was the kind of wedding where the bride
and groom, mature professionals, each already owned a home, so many guests elected to give them
gift certificates or money instead of duplicate eggbeaters or
candlesticks. By evening’s end, a tall hurricane vase on the gift
table brimmed with cards. But the next day, when the couple met with
family and friends to open gifts, the groom had another one of
those cynical thoughts zip across his brain: “Wasn’t
that hurricane vase full last night?” Again he tried to reason his way out of
suspicion. Maybe they had settled, he thought, like breakfast
cereal in a box or potato chips in a bag. “In my line of
work, I immediately believe the worst, then I try to talk myself
out of it,” he says. So he and his new wife opened their gifts and
were thrilled to see that they had received a full complement of
place settings in their chosen china pattern, plus two coffee
makers, one blender, zero toasters . . . they were happy. But then the groom’s mother asked him
to read the message on the card from a particular friend, and they
couldn’t find the card. No, it’s got to be there, the
groom’s grandmother insisted — she had put it in the
hurricane vase herself. Then a bridesmaid asked about another card
she had seen a friend drop into the big glass vase. They
couldn’t find that one, either. “And that’s when the sinking feeling
started to set in,” the groom says. After a review of the guest list and a few
excruciatingly awkward phone calls — “Hey, I hate to
ask you this, but did you give us a monetary wedding
present?” — it was obvious: Someone had reached into
the vase and taken a handful or two of the cards. In other words,
some thief had stolen their gifts. Pilfered the presents. Looted
the booty. But what this thief did wasn’t just
wrong, it was foolish — and I mean foolish on a scale
that’s difficult to fathom. The groom, see, is Steve
Weinhoeft — first assistant state’s attorney for
Sangamon County. More than a dozen of his co-workers, including his
boss, State’s Attorney John Schmidt, attended the wedding, as
did a handful of judges and the entire cast of detectives from what
the Springfield Police Department used to call the “major
case” squad. And that’s just on the groom’s
side. The bride, Amy Nash, is the daughter of retired FBI agent
Steve Nash, who now works as an investigator at the secretary of
state’s inspector general’s office. A few of his
co-workers were present at the reception, too. “Yeah, pretty much a who’s-who of
the justice system, that’s for sure,” recalls SPD Sgt.
Tim Young, the one person who passed by the hurricane
vase, walked up to Weinhoeft, and handed him his card. “I don’t like just leaving money
lying around. I guess that’s from 26 years of dealing with
criminals. I don’t trust anyone,” Young says. “I
gave him $100, if you wanna know. Cash.” His supervisor, Lt. Rickey Davis,
wasn’t as suspicious. He put his gift in the hurricane vase.
It was one of several cards from cops that got stolen. Now these same detectives are working the
case. Just this week, a promising lead developed when a couple of
the gift cards were cashed in by someone other than Steve or Amy. Weinhoeft says there’s no way to know
exactly how many items were stolen or how much money he and the new
Mrs. Weinhoeft are missing. He’s the kind of guy who can
chuckle about the whole thing — “There really is an
irony there” — especially those moments when he let all
that fairytale wedding stuff muffle messages from his jaded gut. “Unfortunately,” he says,
“sometimes people do bad things.”